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Saturday Snippets 21 July 2018

21st July 2018 by Jax Blunt 2 Comments

{Thinking} it’s been a really weird and sad week in the blogging world with the sudden death of Kate from WitWitWoo. The way the community has gathered round to support her sons and build each other up has been fabulous. Check out #bemorewitwitwoo on Instagram to catch up.

I don’t remember which conference/event I met Kate at. She’s one of those people you feel like you’ve always known, and I’m still trying to process the idea that she’s gone. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

{Eating} lemon and rosemary roasted chicken. (Got a new Gino book – healthy budget eating. )

{Watching} This is Spinal Tap. (It was in the 90 minutes or shorter section on NowTV. )

{Reading} The Kindness Method. And I’ve got a lovely new Foyles notebook so I can write my plans in it.

{Practising} my drawing again. I’ll crack portraits yet.

Snapshots.

Fab beach trip to catch up with home ed friends who moved to Scotland but were back for a visit. Turns out Smallest can swim if it’s the sea. Small is practising for next week’s gig and Big had a lovely trip to London to see a kentwell friend.

Saturday Snippets 21 July 2018

21st July 2018 by Jax Blunt Leave a Comment

{Eating} lemon and rosemary roasted chicken. (Got a new Gino book – healthy budget eating. )

{Watching} This is Spinal Tap. (It was in the 90 minutes or shorter section on NowTV. )

{Reading} The Kindness Method. And I’ve got a lovely new Foyles notebook so I can write my plans in it.

{Practising} my drawing again. I’ll crack portraits yet.

Snapshots.

Bloglovin v Feedly – and what is RSS anyway?

28th March 2017 by Jax Blunt 9 Comments

Time for an update on the Bloglovin situation. As you may have seen if you’re on social media (and if you’re not, how did you get here anyway? 😉 ) Bloglovin have made a statement that the canonical URL pointing to their site was an oversight, it’s all been fixed, and everything is hunky dory.

Except.

There’s still that little issue of a copy of your content on their site. And your images. And share options which share the bloglovin URL *not* your site.

This isn’t how RSS readers usually work. Sorry, but no. Back in the mists of time (probably around 2005??) I did some development work using RSS, and for my sins, I know way more about RSS than most people realise there is to know.

Basically, and this is the as non technical as I can make it version, your blog consists of content that you’ve written, then a whole load of instructions (html, css, code) that are used by computers at various stages to display it in friendly formats for people to read. Your content in this case isn’t just the blog post itself, it’s the tags, categories, title and so on – all the bits that are different from post to post.

RSS is a different way of describing that content, and it’s utterly consistent so that every RSS reader everywhere knows exactly what data it’s getting. Yes, readers can then display it differently, and can make it more or less pretty, but RSS is a really tightly defined way of listing out which bit of content is which.

In a recently updated help article on their site they say

What does Bloglovin’ do with my content?

Once we discover new content via your RSS feed we incorporate it into our platform in a few different ways.

First, we update your blog’s profile page on our platform, this page contains a summary of ever post on your blog.

Next, we create a page on our site where your content lives, this page has a canonical URL pointing to your blog post and ensures that google and others know that you are the creator. You get all the credit for the post. We prominently display your blog’s name and URL, and link directly to the original post.

OK, and this is where we’ve gone a bit off the reader aspect of it all.

Disregarding the canonical bit (which isn’t entirely correct if you’re using feedburner or feedblitz to serve your feed, they’re using that URL not your site URL), let’s look at what happens with that content page.

If you tweet this version of someone’s post, you tweet a link to bloglovin. If you pin an image, you pin the bloglovin page. How is this giving the content creator all credit for the post? Good grief, my name as author isn’t even on the page! If someone comments on this created page, I don’t get a notification, and as far as I can tell, I can’t moderate it. Jolly good. Can’t see any potential issues there at all.

What should a good RSS reader do? Enter Feedly.

Isn’t that clean? (I’m a big fan of simple and elegant.)

Yes, it’s still minus my blog sidebars and so on (which means any advertising there is invisible) – that’s because RSS only serves up your written content as it were. But see those share options? If you use them, you share links to your post, direct on your site. Feedly isn’t hogging the limelight here, they are merely allowing people to gather feeds in one place, read the content quickly and easily, and interact with it in the way they want. Perfect.

If you want to set your RSS to an excerpt (wordpress>settings>reading) feedly will display just that excerpt with a link to let people arrive at the original. Do be aware that will affect anything that relies on your RSS – so potentially email subscriptions? Depends how you’re setting it all up.

Bloglovin has moved from being an RSS aggregator/ RSS reader to being a full on syndication site. They are publishing your content (if they’d like to disagree with that assertion, perhaps they could explain the value in the og:publisher field? That’s their facebook page ID right there. The original from my site has me as the publisher, funnily enough.)

It might be that you’re OK with that. It might be that you feel that being visible on bloglovin has value for you – and only you can take that decision. But I’d ask you – how many views are your articles getting on their site? And how much traffic is actually arriving at your own site from there? Who is really getting the benefit of your hard work here? Is it you? Or is it bloglovin?

Personally, I’m moving all the feeds I follow to feedly, and pulling my blog from Bloglovin 🙂

Edited to add – you can grab an importable list of all your feeds from bloglovin here and import them to feedly here. Thanks for the tip Anna 🙂

Find this post useful? Please feel free to share, or you could even buy me a coffee 😉

Bloglovin, syndication, and the canonical URL issue.

26th March 2017 by Jax Blunt 19 Comments

Many bloggers use bloglovin as a way for their readers to follow them and see their content. When it was just an RSS aggregation service, this wasn’t a problem, and many bloggers have built up hundreds, or even thousands of followers on the service, and see a good amount of traffic from it.

Right at the moment though, there’s something not healthy in the world of Bloglovin, and that something is a snippet of code, claiming that the bloglovin version of our blog posts is the original and definitive version.

It looks like this, and it’s called a canonical URL. Used well in syndication, it would point the copy of the article back to the original on the content provider’s site, as described by searchengineland here so search engines would know which version to rank in their listings.

Can you spot the problem with how Bloglovin are using it?

Now, there’s a whole lot of misinformation flying around social media about what the problems are with bloglovin right now. Lots of people saying the issue is that they’re displaying the full post instead of a snippet, or that they are using a frame, or that they’re not using a frame, that you can fix it by changing your RSS settings, or by putting in a page break, or linking to code snippets to break frames and so on.

I don’t see those things as the major issue here. Some are factors that make me doubt the value of the service, but not the problem I’m looking to get fixed right now. There are some ways to view your posts via a frame on bloglovin – if I’m using a laptop and I go to my profile and click through on posts, I see this:

. That’s showing my site, albeit wrapped in a frame, those are my links, if you hit the share buttons at the bottom of the post, you’re going to add my post to pinterest and so on.

However, if you go to a blog profile like mine and then click on the date link next to the title you get a page served entirely on bloglovin site, and looking like this.

Not a lot of point in paying for a theme, having sidebar, ads, follow buttons or anything is there? None of that stuff is visible. It’s just *my* content, on bloglovin’s site. Complete with *my* images, copied to their cloud network. This means if you hit a pinterest or facebook share on that page, you share the bloglovin page, which remember, has that lovely little canonical snippet of code in it, claiming the content as belonging to bloglovin. There’s even a comment field, and if people comment on there, you don’t get any notification of it.

As Zoe just pointed out on twitter, this takes Bloglovin from RSS reader to RSS scraper. Not where they want to be positioning themselves, surely?

..but this takes them from RSS reader to RSS scraper and that's not on. Only way to stop is turn off RSS & that's bad

— Zoe C (Mama Geek) (@zoecorkhill) March 26, 2017

Note *if* I were only showing a summary in my RSS (on wordpress in dashboard, see settings> Reading) then there would only be part of my post on that page. Like this from life in a breakdown

This is obviously better than having all my content on the site, but the canonical URL code is still there even on this snippeted code, and the picture has still been copied.

We need bloglovin to respond to this and fast. Bloggers lost faith in the service last night, and lack of any public reply to those concerns is worrying. I’ve raised a support ticket here and my tweet from last night is getting a lot of interest so now I guess we wait and see.

hey @bloglovin want to explain why *my* content on *your* site has rel=canonical coding?
Spread the word #bloggers #bookbloggers

— Jax Blunt (@liveotherwise) March 25, 2017

If you’re a blogger, what do you think about all of this? Let me know, but in the comments on the original post please 😉

What are you really writing about?

17th August 2015 by Jax Blunt 14 Comments

And what do searchers actually find?

There’s all sorts of ways to analyse your blog content, traffic, search engine referrals and so on. Lots of them are terribly serious. Spreadsheets. Software. I daresay you can draw graphs.

This isn’t serious at all. And I’m sorry, blogspot users, part of it is wordpress focussed, though I daresay you could tweak the methods for your own purposes.

So first of all – what do *you* think you’re writing about? I analysed this by looking at the tags I put on posts (labels in blogspot terms), so I installed a tag cloud widget/plugin (that’s the wordpress bit). The widget should be showing down at the bottom of my sidebar right at the moment, but I also took a screenshot, so that I could put it directly in the blog post.

Here you go.

Not completely what I expected, to be honest, but then again, I didn’t select over the last year or so, and I *do* have 12 years of archives which are on very different topics to my current interests. I’ll try redoing it on a more recent span to match the other clouds I’m going to share, as they are both based on rather more recent timescales. (The plugin claims to be configurable, but it might require coding, and it’s kind of late at night for that kind of thing 😉 )

The next analysis is via Tagxedo which takes a variety of input – I gave it my blog feed. So it’s looking at the text from my last ten posts to give you this version – ie what I’m really writing about, rather than what I’m labelling it as. (You could do this from any site that supports an RSS feed – that’s the thing you use to power things like bloglovin.)

Ah yes. Parenting. Children, books, reading. I suppose it’s obvious those are my most used words, and also I guess they don’t really to be in my tags if they’re in my content that much 🙂

And the final analysis?

This is a tag cloud version of the keywords from my google analytics account. There’s a big caveat with this – far and away the largest percent of my keywords aren’t disclosed to me, as google doesn’t give any information on keywords from users who are logged in. Having said that though, I think this is kind of fascinating. (If you’re wondering how I did it, I followed the instructions here and tweaked them a bit for the updates in analytics since it was written.)

So, basically, most people find my blog by searching either directly for it (live otherwise, making it up) or by looking for help with their Mazda. Seriously, look how many of those search terms include the word Mazda. Thta’s all down to my rants about the problems we had with the DPF on our car. (You can read the full post here if you desperately want to.) I can also tell this by looking at my traffic day to day – the Mazda post gets visitors Every. Single. Day. Which is a bit depressing, when I think about all the things I’ve written that are oh so carefully crafted and designed for readers. Do they get readers? yeah, a few. But nothing like that rant about the car.

What do you think you write about then? And what does google send your way? I’d love to hear if you fancy trying any tag cloud analysis on your blot.

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